When the prehistoric peoples of Ethiopia wanted to make a new cave painting, it appears they knew just where to go: Porc-Epic is a cave that, for 4,500 years, was used to produce ochre, a brownish-yellow pigment often used in prehistoric artwork. The Porc-Epic cave was discovered by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Henry de Monfreid in 1929 and thought to date to about 43,000 to 42,000 years ago, during the Middle Stone Age. At the site, archaeologists found a stash of 4213 pieces, or nearly 90 pounds, of ochre, the largest such collection ever discovered at a prehistoric site in East Africa. (A similar find was discovered in a 100,000-year-old cave in South Africa in 2011.) The researchers also compared pieces with long pointy ends to ochre “crayons.”According to the paper, the local community relied on Porc-Epic for its ochre needs for millennia, the cave essentially serving as a studio for artists.

Source: Ethiopian News June 02, 2017 14:32 UTC